For many prescribed medical treatments, such as, but not limited to: medication; physical therapy; dietary changes; activity level changes; other lifestyle changes; and/or surgical procedures; it is important that the patient perceive a benefit and/or some level of progress as result of the prescribed treatment. Often this perception of benefit/progress is not just important for general patient morale, but the perception itself can often expedite the healing process and/or keep the patient motivated to continue the medical treatment program.
This need to see the benefits/progress associated with a medical treatment is even more pronounced in the modern information age when many people are obsessed with seeing a direct cause-and-effect link with their actions, tracking results, and receiving almost continuous feedback. Despite their desire for information and feedback, currently, most patients undergoing medical treatment have, at best, only a vague sense of whether a prescribed medical treatment is having the desired effect, and these patients typically do not have any sense of how their results measure up to expected and/or average results.
Some patients can, and do, track the effect of a given treatment using any one of several mechanisms ranging from handwritten diary-type records to electronic spread sheets. However, currently, even these “tracker” patients still typically lack the capability and/or data for tracking their individual results against expected or average results; nor do these patients typically have the means or mechanisms for displaying any data they may obtain in any meaningful/useful way.
In addition, many prescribed treatments, particularly medications, have known side-effects and/or predictable stage's of progress/results. In many cases, these side effects are harmless and pass with time. However, it is also often the case that the persistence of these side effects can be an indication of more serious problems and/or reactions to the treatment. Here again, many patients would like, and would benefit from, a capability to track their symptoms/side effects against expected symptoms/side effects and/or the average person's experience. However, currently, patients typically have neither the capability, nor the data, to perform this analysis beyond, at best, some generalized printed materials provided with their treatment and, once again, these patients typically lack the means or mechanisms for displaying any data they may obtain in any meaningful/useful and/or correlated way.
In some cases, patients can, and do, obtain information regarding various medical treatments in general from any one of several secondary data sources such as the Internet. However, the reliability of the information so obtained is often questionable, the information is often inconsistent and/or contradictory from website-to-website, and the information is almost never specific to a given patient. Consequently, even those patients who do track their results/progress, and do seek out more information, often lack confidence in the information itself and are still typically left without any means for comparing and/or displaying results in a meaningful way even if the information obtained were reliable and/or correct.
Many medical treatments require the patient to take pro-active steps, and, in many cases, take actions that require self-discipline and/or an investment of time, energy, and money. In addition, many healthcare service providers need to see, or at least would benefit from seeing, results in order to determine the efficacy of a given treatment. Consequently, the current inability to track results in a simple and meaningful way is a very real problem because it can be difficult for the patient to see that their investment/sacrifice is worthwhile. This, in turn, contributes to one of the largest problems facing the healthcare industry today, the problem of patient non-compliance with recommended medical treatments. Each year, patient non-compliance results in avoidable worsening of the patients' condition, avoidable emergency/corrective care costs, and, in some cases, permanent injury to the patients and/or death.